RESEARCH
Functional diversity of fish communities
The functional roles of fish consumers can dictate the level of energy that moves through marine coastal ecosystems. I am interested in how both inter- and intraspecific variation of functional traits within fish communities change across space and time. Specifically, I am focusing on traits which can inform three functional roles: (1) energy acquisition, (2) movement and (3) nutrient recycling in marine fish consumer communities. With these data, I plan to explore the relationship between functional redundancy, ecosystem stability and function to better understand the fate of communities under environmental change.
Collaborators: Dr. Randall Hughes, RI DEM, The Nature Conservancy-Rhode Island
Metacommunity and meta-ecosystem dynamics across Rhode Island coastal lagoons
The spatial dynamics of species (via dispersal) can influence both local interactions within a community and contribute to the overall regional stability of a metacommunity. In addition to species movement, nutrient dynamics can also influence ecosystem stability across spatial scales. I am interested in understanding what mechanisms drive the function and stability of coastal marine food webs across six coastal lagoons on the
south shore of Rhode Island, focusing on how the presence and configuration of coastal habitats interact to shape metacommunity structure and meta-ecosystem function. To tackle these objectives, I plan to use a combination of field surveys, manipulative experiments and mathematical modeling to test how coastal habitats facilitate food web complexity and
nutrient subsidies in order to expand our understanding of meta-community/ecosystem processes in coastal marine systems.
Collaborators: Dr. Randall Hughes, RI DEM, The Nature Conservancy-Rhode Island
Influence of Habitat Structure on Predator-Prey Relationships
Understanding how foraging and refuge abilities of predators and prey, respectively, interact with habitat structure can inform how predator-prey dynamics realistically play out in natural ecosystems. I am specifically interested in how mid-to-top level consumer, predator-prey relationships, in a seagrass system are mediated through the density of structural elements present (e.g. shoot density) and/or the configuration of habitat patches (e.g. patchy vs. contiguous seagrass). For my Master's thesis, I used both empirical and modeling approaches to understand how the body size of common mesopredator juvenile fish, the giant kelpfish, interacts with both local (shoot density) and landscape (patchiness) variation in habitat structure to mediate it's refuge and foraging abilities.
Collaborators: Dr. Kevin Hovel (SDSU), Dr. Helan Regan (UCR)
Juvenile giant kelpfish (Heterostichus rostratus) swimming through eelgrass in San Diego Bay, CA
Barred sand bass predating on tethered juvenile giant kelpfish in a eelgrass bed in San Diego Bay, CA